Nov 12, 2020 21:00:00

Benchmark of Apple's original SoC 'M1' chip will be released, what is its ability?

At the distribution event '

One more thing ' held on November 11, 2020, Apple announced the first in-house SoC 'M1' for Mac, and this M1 chip is the new ' MacBook Air ' ' Mac mini ' It was revealed that it will be installed in all ' MacBook Pro '. Just one day after the announcement, benchmark results for the new MacBook Air, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro with M1 chips are available. The performance of the M1 chip has been clarified.

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro --MacRumors
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/

Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 --What to Expect, Based on A14
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive

Announced extensively at Apple's distribution event 'One more thing'. He emphasized that the process node of the M1 chip is 5 nm and has 16 billion transistors, and the CPU is 3.5 times faster and the graphics are 5 times faster than the conventional product.

Introducing the first Mac 'MacBook Air' equipped with Apple Silicon, graphics performance improved up to 5 times with M1 chip --GIGAZINE

In this announcement, Apple also revealed details of the M1 chip. The appearance of the die is as follows.

On the left are eight high performance cores with a 12MB L2 cache codenamed 'Firestorm'. The

A14 chip Firestorm on the iPhone 12 has only 8MB of L2 cache, which is a big enhancement.

Near the center of the SoC are four high-efficiency cores code-named 'Icestorm', with an 8-core GPU occupying a large die area. The 16-core Neural Engine is common to the A13 and A14 chips.

Just one day after 'One more thing', benchmarks for the new MacBook Air and new Mac mini with this M1 chip were posted on the service of the classic benchmark test app ' Geekbench 5 '. The benchmark results for the new MacBook Air are as follows, with a single-core score of '1687' and a multi-core score of '7433', with a fundamental frequency of '3.20GHz'.

Benchmark results for Mac mini are below. The single core score is '1682', the multi-core score is '7097', and the fundamental frequency is '3.04GHz'.

This is the MacBook Pro. The single core score is '1714', the multi-core score is '6802', and the fundamental frequency is '3.20GHz'.

Below is the result of comparing the single core score of MacBook Air with the single core score of existing Apple devices. Compared to Intel Core i9 etc., the M1 chip is outstanding in single core performance.

Looking at the image below comparing the multi-core scores, you can see that the performance is not as good as the 2020 iMac Core i7, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2019 Mac Pro Xeon.

・ Continued
MacBook Air with Apple's 'M1 chip' outperforms other Macs even under x86 emulation environment-GIGAZINE